Poured Over: Emma Donoghue on Learned by Heart

By Jenna Seery / September 9, 2023 at 6:00 am

“My specialty is digging up obscure stories where there are just enough facts to really stimulate the imagination.”

Emma Donoghue’s newest novel, Learned by Heart, tells the story of young, enigmatic Anne Lister and her first love, an orphaned heiress born in India. Donoghue joins us to talk about the role Anne Lister has played in her life, crowdsourcing research, the importance of historical fiction and more with guest host, Jenna Seery. We end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Mary.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang.          

Featured Books (Episode):
Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue
Room by Emma Donoghue
The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
Haven by Emma Donoghue
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
Matrix by Lauren Groff
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Full Episode Transcript
Jenna Seery
I’m Jenna Seery, a bookseller and associate producer of Poured Over and today I am thrilled to be joined by Emma Donoghue. I’m sure you all know her big books, there’s Room, there’s The Wonder. There’s the books of recent years Pull of the Stars and Haven. But today we are here to talk about her incredible return to historical fiction with Learned by Heart the story of Anne Lister, a figure that many of you will probably know, but is also a figure that there’s always more to learn about. So Emma, thank you so much for being with us today.

Emma Donoghue
Pleasure to be here.

So this book is, like many of your historical fiction novels, based in sort of real people and real events, and expanded into something wonderful and incredible. So I was hoping you’d give us from your perspective, a little description of the book to start.

Sure. Yeah, I absolutely love, I suppose my specialty is digging up obscure stories where there are just enough facts to really stimulate the imagination. But there are never going to be enough facts to make for a sort of solid biographical treatment. So I like to use my kind of academic skills and my powers of imagination to try and flesh something out, so it feels vivid, but so it is as true as I can make it as well. It’s kind of a double task. So Learned by Heart is based on the teenage years of Anne Lister, who’s recently got a lot of wonderful attention to the series, Gentlemen Jack, but also her first lover, totally neglected figure who I think is just fascinating, Eliza Raine, who was an orphan girl sent from India by her British father, and when she was six, and she was quickly orphaned. So even though she had a fortune, she was isolated, and really no loving family to support her. And when she met Anne Lister, when they were 14, they fell hard. And they fell along the love affair that they had in their attic room at the manor school in York, absolutely was the hinge of their lives. It set them on two very different courses, neither of them would ever forget it.

And Lister herself has, like you said, sort of come into the public eye. There have been, you know, her journals or diaries are published and available that she wrote in this incredible code, this sort of mad figure of letters and galivanting across and having many relationships with women. And then there was the television program on HBO Gentlemen Jack that I think sort of thrust her into the limelight. But you have had a connection to Anne Lister for a long time. And I was hoping you talk about that.

You know, like, like many women who’ve fallen for Anne Lister, once you get her in your system, you never get her out. So I encountered her diaries while they’re in back in 1990. As a brand-new graduate student, and I wrote my first play very loosely based on her diaries, the amazing collection by Helena Whitbread called I Know My Own Heart, and that play was about Anne Lister her in her 20s. But I was always fascinated by the backstory that she’d had her first love affair at boarding school with this biracial orphan called Eliza Raine. And I just couldn’t quite forget them. Then many, many years later, as things were starting to sort of warm up in Anne Lister studies, not just many scholars and historians working on them, but to an amazing kind of feedback loop, Sally Wainwright’s TV series actually helped bring more texts out of the out of the darkness as well. And Sally Wainwright won an early screenwriting award and she poured the money into digitizing the texts, and then the fans got involved. So hundreds of fan codebreakers have been transcribing the Anne Lister diaries. And for my novel, what I really needed was this this cluster of about 100 letters by Anne Lister and by Eliza Raine or about them. And these letters were not transcribed. So I reached out and the fan codebreakers agreed to transcribe the letters for me. So, this novel is the first of mine that’s in some sense, crowd sourced and I’m just so grateful.

That’s so incredible to have that connection, and to be able to make something that you know, people are already going to love and that it sort of has this labor of love behind it, that there’s so many people that are already connected to this work.

Absolutely. And it’s funny, you know, we tend to think of fans as just kind of passively waiting to be given a cultural product and then maybe they can create their own fun around us. But in this case, they’ve actually been helping to bring the archives to light, and they’ve really been contributing to scholarship. So there are analysts or conferences where there’ll be like some cosplayers and top hats so it’s a it’s an amazing kind of mixing of the scholarly and the pop culture sides of Anne Lister and all the women in her life of which I would say, you know, to me, the most interesting is Eliza Raine because she describes herself just once in her in her letters as a young lady of color. Apart from that she never mentioned this color. But you just know, as one of the only brown faces in town in York at boarding school, you know, she would have felt like there was this harsh spotlight on her. So she’s this fascinating figure, you know, a point of view on Regency culture, which is so different from others. And she was very privileged in some ways, like, she had a big fat fortune in the bank that her British father had left her, but she was utterly isolated and under strain in other ways, I really feel she should be better known than all the other women and unless just life but in fact, she’s been the most neglected.

And I do somehow feel that endless or would love that there are like conventions about her and that there are sort of these big groups of people, mostly women who fawn over her diaries. I feel like, somewhere she’s tipping her hat.

I think she would pretend to be sniffy about us, right? Because she considered most of us commoners, you know, she was a total snob, very right wing. But one thing was fun about bringing her to life as a teenager is that I don’t think your opinions have hardened then. So I show her with the kind of, you know, physical energy, and she used to stride for, you know, 20 miles over the Moors, and intellectual energy and certainly flirtatious energy that she always had. But I also show her with her views still unformed. You know, she’s still, you know, relatively liberal in her politics, I didn’t think I had to sort of commit to the way she was by her 40s. I tried to show her in that stage of teenager, adolescence, where you’re still, you know, you’re still open to things, including being changed by love.

And the voice is so strong with Anne Lister. I mean, we do have so much of her writing that sort of explains and allows us an insight into her voice. But I think, falling into that, and being able to write an entire sort of novel around it at all your play as well. Did it feel interesting to come back to her voice after writing the play so long ago and stepping back into that world?

Yeah, it was fun. There’s a distinctive sort of Anne Lister, you know, confident, boastful rhythm. But interestingly, when I started writing this novel, I thought, Oh, I’ll probably alternate between Anne Lister and Eliza Raine, but very quickly, I realized that my actual point of view had to be Eliza Raine because she’s the new element. She’s the lost voice, she’s the hidden figure. So even though Anne Lister, in terms of dialogue, you know, bounces through these pages, the point of view on everything is Eliza reign, and I just found she was so much more interesting that I had to follow my instincts and let her have the whole novel to narrate. Because, you know, unless there has been able to have her say in 5 million words of diary, so neglected and she was, you know, treated so badly. And so, you know, forgotten and erased that writing a novel from the point of view of this particular girl who was so such a sort of marginal figure in British society, I think was much more satisfying to me than just, you know, let again, Lister hold the mic, as it were.

Eliza is the heart of this book. There’s the warmth and the struggles and the sort of your heart just goes with her as she’s trying to unpack all these things. And first love is always such a heightened and expansive experience. But this is something so entirely different. And there isn’t like you said, there isn’t much scholarship, if any on Eliza Raine herself and we have such a limited view of her as a person. So how did you find her voice in all of this?

Well, luckily, there were, as I say it, quite a few dozen letters. So the letters are from after the school years. And so we’ve got basically letters from her late teens into her mid 20s. And although she tantalizingly never specifies anything about her background, I mean, we know the city she was from, Madras, we don’t know her mother’s name or religion or ethnic affiliations or anything at that the Indian side was really lost to Eliza when she was sent off at six to be you know, made English. So it’s tantalizing sometimes in terms of information, but in terms of voice there was a lot in the letters. And what I found really interesting is that you know, Eliza had this major breakdown in her mid 20s and really never recovered. And so I’m reading the letter is trying to kind of not diagnose her but figure out what was going on for her. And what’s really interesting is the variation in emotion even within one letter, you might go from her sound and kind of needy and sad and wistful to somebody on the next page. She’s sounding really, you know, like the belle of the ball. She’s so aware that she’s beautiful and glamorous, she says things like oh, you know, I wear a black velvet ribbon in my hair all the locals are copying me so her emotions are very volatile and they vary a lot and she doesn’t have an illustrious kind of sturdiness so tone-wise and in terms of Eliza psychology those letters were just crucial. And then of course I also have the bits that Anne Lister wrote about her and Lister could never forget Eliza that and you know, decades on and she was still saying, Oh, I went to visit Eliza, I bought her some cakes because she’s a really sweet tooth. She’ll say that Eliza was, you know, at the piano or she would specify things, which give me strong hints for Eliza’s interests, she was very interested in music and French and self-education, and she loved to travel. So those letters which are to go by, then as I say, I could not have got hold of them without a whole group of people volunteering to transcribe them.

For me, the primary source aspect of this, I think, really, I mean, the research that you must have done for all of your novels combined over the years is something so vast, because you will have bounced around between so many time periods and places and groups of people. But something that always strikes me in your work is the tactility, of what you create. You do, I think, just as much world building as any fantasy novel when you write because I always feel like I can know what the clothing felt like what the atmosphere of the room was, you know how all of these pieces fit together really in a comprehensive way that is so deep. So I just am so interested in your research process to sort of bring all of these elements together into one thing.

Oh thank you. That’s lovely to hear. Tactility is great word for it because, you know, ironically, even though I write research heavy historical fiction, if I’m reading a novel, I can just sort of see the footnotes. If I’m like, oh, here’s the bit where they educate me about the 30 Years War, you know, I groan. So I want all the sort of nutritional goodness of that research to be there in the fiction, but I don’t want to see the joints, I don’t want to see the cut and paste marks. So I wanted to be somehow magically subsumed into the point of view of the character so we don’t feel we’re being lectured. And in terms of my techniques, I’m always looking for those vivid details, you know, I’d be I have a book called, say Shopping in Regency York. And, you know, I may have only used a handful of details from it. But they would be very specific sensory details about the sights and smells as you went to the city. And you know, which cakes might have been on offer, what they’ve been flavored with, I read a lot about food, and even though there are no elaborate food scenes, but I wanted to be, you know, really precise and vivid about what was being served up to these girls. Because when you’re in any institution, you get obsessed with, you know, what, are they serving us today? Oh, no, it’s the mince again. So I look out for vivid details, I write my draft, and then I slash and burn, I cut out anything that feels like I’m educating you. Unless I can find some plausible reason why the girls in this boarding school would have been arguing about the Prince of Wales’s marriage, I cut it out, I really try and develop a kind of a tunnel vision from my point of view character and the people she’s talking to. And if they don’t care about it, then I do not mention it. So say when in Slammerkin, my first historical novel, I don’t think I mentioned who the king was because my particular street sex worker would not have given a damn who the king was. So I really try and you know, shed, my own interests and only think about what the character would care about, and so yeah, I gather a huge amount of material and then throw most of it away. But you know, of course I feel it benefits the book, Hemingway claims that what we take out of a book is still there in some intangible way. So I try and do that with my research I feel if I throw away 99 details then that the one I keep will have a sort of intense flavor because it’ll have been selected from so many.

I think that the sort of totality of all of this is so profoundly encapsulating of the time I always feel when I read your books that I am I’m right there even if it’s something that I don’t know very much about. And I did see I felt some shades of Slammerkin this because of all of the mentions of the clothing, I’ve that’s one of my favorite things I really like hooks me into a time period is my fabric and clothing and this definitely satisfied.

I was so worried for these girls, they’d be so cold all the time because the uniforms as described in sources about boarding schools, they just had Regency clothing in general it just sounds so flimsy and there was little list of shoes and so on. And what’s great also is museums that let you say try on copies of clothes from the time you know I’ll never forget strapping on my first few production corsets and realizing oh my god this thing’s up breastplate felt military, felt protective so yeah, there’s nothing like getting to actually sort of try the experiences you know, like eat the you know, rosewater sponge cake or whatever. And of course, you know going to Yorkshire and walking the streets and looking for the tiny little details or poking around the king’s Manor and the building or the school walls, I had an architectural professor gave me a tour of the building and it was just brilliant. You know, he could point out something about where the drain pipes were nailed up you know, he was helping me to see tiny details that I wouldn’t have myself so you know, the help of others and physically visiting the locations and just, you know, paying attention in a in a myopic, obsessive way to what everyday life would have been like those things over really help.

And they help the readers too, because like you said, it never does feel like reading homework or reading a textbook. It’s just as familiar feeling as when you write more contemporary fiction like Room, which obviously doesn’t have a lot of connection, hopefully, for most people, they’ve never been in that experience. But there are those shades of understanding a space so entirely and being able to fully communicate, these are all of the sensory elements, I think that’s something so important in connecting with the book is being able to find all sides of it. If you just have a great character that someone might enjoy. It’s hard to really immerse yourself in it without feeling that entire world around you.

That’s true. And there are no shortcuts. Yeah, I’ve done almost no science fiction, I did one novella set, 20 years in the future, and it was such hard work to, to create every little detail. And I realized, you know, I’m used to drawing on historical sources, rather than inventing the entire thing, and trying to create a society which is plausibly like ours, but with 20 years of development in one particular direction. Oh, that was such a hard task. So I have massive respect for those who do that all the time. But yeah, I love contouring of the past. And I love getting that kind of balance between the timeless and the time specific. So yeah, I’m describing, say, falling in love at 14, I drew a lot of my own memories of school and falling in love and being like, oh my god, I’m the only gay in the world, which is what it felt like in 1980s Ireland, but I also tried to go for the historical specifics to you know, there’s a squirming conversation where Eliza’s headmistress has her for teaand basically boasts about being anti slavery and boasts about the extra expensive sugar they buy to be slavery free. That’s just so mortifying to realize, and that’s a conversation you wouldn’t have had in 1980, but you definitely would have had in 1805. So I love bringing the reader, you know, close up, and then those little moments where the reader backs off thinking like, Oh, these people are so different, you know, they thought so definitely about everything. And above all, I suppose I want the reader to feel like they’ve been on a trip, you know, not just in an escapist way, but like they’ve genuinely been to a foreign country. And of course, recognized every day and timeless human emotions there, but also have that kind of shiver of difference and tasted, tasted the flavor of a different historical era.

Yes, I mean, of course, I’ll never experience this exact thing. I’ll never have this school and this time, but I’ve been a teenage girl. And there are so many teenage girl moments that are so timeless.

That’s nice to hear. I have a teenage girl like so I got her to, uh, not only, you know, when she tells me stuff, but the sort of dynamics at school, but also things like, you know, the game, that the mind game they play of trying to forget the game, you know, she bought that home. And I thought that could easily have been invented in the 18th century. It’s a timeless sort of mind game, just that the dynamic between teenagers. Yeah, so I use plenty of contemporary sources, including my own kids, as well as historical ones.

Yes, I think millennials and younger will really recognize the game scene and have a little bit of frustration, because they will have all just lost.

Yeah, so sorry about that.

But there are those moments of familiarity. And I love the real historical pieces that I can recognize as I go through. And so many of your works have sort of bridged between taking those real historical figures and events and extrapolating and moving forward. But is it harder almost to it seems to me like it’d be harder almost to write characters that there is more known about because you have to sort of fit all the pieces in like with Anne Lister. With the more we know there’s more sort of beats you have to hit but with someone more like Eliza Raine, you can really expand on all the pieces that we may not know.

Yeah, I guess with Eliza Raine, I felt freer to come to my own view of what she was like, based on what people had said about her and the letters we do have. Whereas with Anne Lister, sources could be seen as overwhelming. But on the other hand, the fact that I was writing about her at 14 was a real liberation because yeah, there were certain non-negotiables like I thought, okay, she’s got to walk in with muddy hands, like, like Eliza Bennet in Pride and Prejudice because she was always walking everywhere. I thought, you know, she’ll, she’ll break the rules from the word go, but I didn’t feel I had to, you know, stick to all the elaborate details of her future life or her future opinions, because, you know, she was not yet really a land member of the landed gentry. She was this nobody from a farm so I was able to shed a lot of the adult Anne Lister stuff, you know, the sort of elaborate snobbery is and you know, I’ve met the Queen of Denmark. You know, the 14-year-old had in no way met the Queen of Denmark. She’d met nobody and I’m not sure she’d been to London. She’d never been out of Yorkshire. So it was kind of like stripping away the layers of the onion and just getting to the kind of core Anne Lister as this androgynous, rule breaking you know, entertaining, witty, brilliant girl who I thought would shake up any school she walked into and in particular, and for someone like Eliza Raine, who was really kind of waiting around for life to begin because she was so she was so unloved and she had his fortune waiting for her. But in the meantime, she had rather cold gardens and a sister didn’t like her. So I could just imagine her kind of like a pile of dry tinder coming to life. When the magic of Lister dropped on her.

I had a lot of complicated feelings about her sister that was, you know, I try to be fair with fictional characters and understand where they’re coming from. But Jane and I did not get along as I was reading.

You know, I never wrote any 100% villains I try and you know, imply a little bit of sympathy for Jane that she’s clearly in a bad situation too. She doesn’t even want to board at the school because you know, any boarding school would be a kind of a totalitarian institution, you know, where every hour of your day is decided by other people. So I could see Jane was sort of trying to keep her distance from it. But yes, there are many people in the book who are who are really not kind to Eliza, I’m quite hard on some of the teachers say— oh, okay, there’s an example of his historical source I just couldn’t have written this book without. I was trying to bring the teachers to life and one of the many people I’ve met on the internet through sort of Anne Lister studies, this Irish genealogist called San Ní Ríocáin. And she found me this letter from their teacher, Miss Luhan, to the Irish playwright, Arthur Murphy, basically giving a vivid description of the school including the fact that there was a pig living in one of the downstairs rooms, she described the school and some of the other teachers and the fact that she had moved to the school with her female partner, I was like, Oh my God, you’ve found your genuine lesbian teacher that they had in that very year. And you know, I wouldn’t have found that text on my own. So it was so helpful, especially to have just a couple of details about each of the girls of their own age who would have been in school at the same time as Anne and Eliza. I really didn’t want some faceless group of girls who are just the kind of traditional mean girl types. So knowing that specific facts about them, so one girl Betty, for instance, I knew that she was you know, quite high status, wealthy father and so on. But then halfway through the term, her father died, and she left the school, so I was like, Okay, that’s all I need, you know, the idea of this high status girl who’s suddenly like dragged home, which illuminates the possible fate for all of them. So yeah, the sources I found that other people found for me just really, really helped bring this community vividly to life.

I think the something that’s so magical about this book is the idea of getting to tell stories that are not told over and over again, in all of this from Anne Lister, who yes, has her sort of moment to shine now, but you know, I don’t think it’s a very far off alternate reality that a life like hers could have gone relatively covered up.

this this moment in the late 19th century, when you know, her a descendant of hers, he and his friends have those old volumes from the from the walls, and, and they managed to break the code. Apparently, for codebreakers, it’s not that difficult to code. And as friend says, more or less your aunt was a monster, you know, seducing every woman in Yorkshire Let’s burn these volumes. And luckily, her descendants said no, I don’t think I should burn them. Let’s just put them back, you know, put them away on the shelves, but don’t actually burn them. So yeah, that’s the moment we could have lost all trace of Anne Lister. And oh, just to think of all we have lost already, you know, the many, many women whose stuff was burned.

That’s what I always think when I read these historical fictions. I mean, even this group of girls, like you said, in the school, they are not sort of women that will rise to the, through the ranks, or they may not have things written about them, and to just get those glimpses of what life was like for these normal girls and going through their school years and trying to, you know, have fun and play games and dream about their future. It’s, it’s really something special to read, because so many of us can connect to that, from when we went through it.

Absolutely. And one thing I love about using historical sources is that it’s almost always odder than you would invent. So you know, the pig in their school, I would not have thought to install a large pig in a downstairs room in their school. Even though I knew the building was kind of rather multipurpose and had other tenants and stuff, I don’t think I would have invented the pig. So historical sources just you know, forced me to include life in all its quirky, peculiar variousness.

Anne Lister and Eliza Raine and so many other sorts of go to prove something I say over and over is that like, there were always queer people, they’ve always existed, whether it has been covered or you know, by that person themselves, or by those around them, and getting now that opportunity to tell these stories and to expand on these ideas and give light to all these things that have passed. I think historical fiction is such a great way to bring these things now into the, into our dialogue.

It’s funny, it feels more urgent than ever at the moment that I have to say, especially in America, where we’re seeing such a such a sort of pushback against LGBTQ rights, and I loved in particular getting to write about Anne Lister as a genuinely, gender non variance person, you know, who knows what label nowadays would fit her. And she, she was very clear that she didn’t want to be a man, but that she thought of herself as like a man in some ways. So she was really resistant to all the rules of gender, both physically and mentally. And emotionally, she saw herself as just, you know, kicking over those walls. So I loved writing a kind of, you know, sort of a non binary teenager character, and which is entirely true to the Anne Lister sources. And it’s funny, you know, the women she got involved with almost none of them, I don’t think any of them sort of were aware of themselves as what we might call a lesbian beforehand. It’s just met Anne Lister, she changed them, and they reacted to her as this, you know, that she was this extraordinary kind of husband figure in their lives. So it makes you think a lot about how much of our relationships is, is a response to those we meet rather than a sort of pre existing set identity. So yeah, the Eliza Raine story, it raises so many interesting questions about identity in terms of race, and gender and sexuality. And none of this did I need to kind of, you know, come up with nowadays and impose on historical story. It’s all absolutely there in the sources. It’s just it’s much clearer a love story than we are used to reading in representations of Regency England,

And I think so many people are that I know, I mean, I love historical fiction, I read a lot of it. And so many of people I talk to, they’re hesitant, they’re resistant, because they just don’t think those stories can connect to what they’re experiencing now or that they’re so they’re looking for what they need in contemporary fiction, and I’m like, but it’s really all there. And historical fiction, too. I promise if you just find the right one, there’s a right one for everyone.

That’s true. And it’s there in so many genres. I mean, you know, sci fi is such a haven for different visions of the world, too. So you’re right, people shouldn’t just, you know, go looking for a book about someone who sounds just like them now. And I think it’s in particular tied to reading about, say, queer lives from the past, because I know when I was growing up, and you know, at 14, fell in love and realized I was, you know, I was queer, I remember thinking, like, you know, it’s just this just some decadent modern invention sort of thing, because it you know, the culture was making it sound like it was just a little, you know, offshoot of feminism, you know, experimenting as they used to call it, and or the idea of lesbian chic in the 90s, that it was some kind of passing fad. And so I found it, profoundly consoling and energizing and uplifting to come across previous lives, like say, Emily Dickinson, you know, if I read one of her poems, in my teens, I was like, she’s in love with her sister in law, you know, clearly, this has always happened. And so I don’t have to feel like I’m just some cultural, you know, bit of fluff a temporary fad.

Even for people who may be like, that’s nothing I’ve ever even thought about, to understand that rich history and to understand that the struggle continues, and for queer individuals, for people of color, that all of these struggles are ongoing, and to understand our history, and how we all relate to it. There’s no better connecting way than fiction, I think there’s, whether it’s any genre, if you can find that connection through a great book, I think it hits somewhere different in your brain, and you start to understand things in a different way.

I agree, possibly biggest, when you’re reading a novel, you have to do a bit of work to translate those words into pictures in your head and sounds in your head. Whereas with a film, it’s fed to you. So I think people literally invest more of themselves in fiction and so they feel then more truly immersed, because they have, they have woven half the experience with our own minds. With Eliza I used a lot of contemporary sources about you know, micro aggressions, and the effect of racism on health, she was doing just fine in her 20s You know, young heiress living on her own education and beautiful, and then her life fell apart so badly. So I did a huge amount of, of reading contemporary material on things like the little ways that the microaggressions build up until you think you’re going mad. You’re like, did I imagine that? You know, what, looking at me funny? Is that what she meant when she said that? So I decided, you know, historical fiction often emphasizes really, like, you know, sometimes heavy handed depictions of racism, like, oh, here comes the overseer with his whip. And that is all true. But I think if you write a story in which the racism is just sort of bubbling under the surface, it can feel far more like contemporary experiences and it can, it can really sort of get under your skin and connect to modern life more than if you sort of, you know, emphasize the capital R racism.

For people who truly love reading and that have found that ability to integrate themselves into what they’re reading and do research. Like I constantly as I’m reading books, I think of it as I just spend what half of the time googling because especially with fiction, I have to be like, oh, I need to know what that looked like. So then I have to go and do an extra amount of work. So when I leave a book, I feel like I’ve really done something with myself when I’ve finished.

Fascinating. So really, you’re creating a sort of multimedia experience there, you’re reading the book, but you’re supplementing it with, with, you know, looking up in images and so on from that, I think that’s very interesting.

Especially with the things that I don’t know, because I want to be sure, and especially things from I mean, when I read things about cultures that I really have no grasp that I have, you know, there’s so much thing so much we never learned in school, or if we don’t sort of put the work into finding it for ourselves. It just passes us by and I think fiction again, it’s just that perfect inlet into it. Because the stories are so human. Everything is you know, the same whether you’re in the US whether you’re in England, whether you’re in China, Japan, the humaneness is always the same.

Yeah, yeah, true. And I’ve always written, you know, ridiculously long author notes to my historical fiction, because I’m not like a magician covering up my technique and going, Oh, look at my dazzling result, I really want the whole thing to be collaborative. I really want readers to be able to go find out more, but everything I’ve written about what other writers to be able to go off, find my sources and springboard from there, I would love to see many books about Eliza Raine published, I’d love to see films about her, when I put a lot of work into kind of digging these things up, I feel an absolute obligation to share, to share all the paths that I took so that others can find out more. And because as you say, it’s all a wonderfully collaborative process. Every time a book is read, you know, the reader and the writer coming together to make to make sparks fly.

Yeah, I think so many people think of reading as like a solitary experience. But for me, that is absolutely not the case. I know your website has a lot of bibliography works listed for your books. And so I always check those out.

And of course, you know, social media who would have expected that it would be such a promoter and share of books. You know, it’s magic. When you when I first heard about Tik Tok, I never would have thought one day it’ll be used for his book promotion, you know, and that feeling of like direct enthusiastic sharing from one reader to another, it’s thrilling.

Yeah, I always think about how, like, maybe when I was 12 years old, and reading, you know, Slammerkin by myself somewhere, I would have been able to find other people reading that book at the same time so much more easily and found that community I think that’s such an amazing thing of watching these communities of young readers grow and pass books back and forth and pass ideas.

It’s incredible to me because it used to be to the gatekeepers, right? So you only found my fairytale book in your teens, because the librarian stocked it, right. Whereas nowadays, you’re gonna hear about it directly from other 12-year-olds. So in a way the walls have come down. It’s incredible.

And I hope that you know, continuously people are just moving these books around, and especially in your sort of set of works because you have bounced between every place and every type of character. I just am always baffled when I hear your next thing because I’m just can’t wait to be like, when is it set? Where is it?

I know like to get the board. I’d rather do the extra work but it is extra work you like Haven and stuff in the seventh century. So I was like, Oh, I know nothing. I’m starting from scratch. I’ve completely ignorant about the I don’t even know that they have shoes. So it’s extra work, but it’s way more entertaining. And when you’re in a writing career for the long haul. I think keeping the juices flowing, you know, keeping the kind of writerly libido high is the crucial thing because the big fear is that you’ll just get bored and stuck and have nothing new to say. So yeah, I do like a challenge.

And so do we reading it because I am always ready for whatever is the next thing but I really want to ask you because I’m dying to know I love talking to you about your own work and all of the sort of scholarly sources that you have used but literary influences wise who are the Emma Donoghue who sort of literary influences Who do you read?

Oh they’re so varied. And like if I think of people who I always, always read, I like I’d always, I’d always buy the latest Zadie Smith, Roddy Doyle and Jane Smiley, Ann Patchett. I’ve just started her new one. And so they would be just a sprinkling of the writers who like, like, always rush to buy, but equally the books that I’ve never heard of and somebody sends me a proof copy or I come across on a friend’s bookshelf and borrowers, you know, they can they can spark you to life too. So I’m always sort of open to the books that drift into my life, and I often buy I say nonfiction books to try and expand my knowledge of areas that I’m ignorant about. So I try not to just follow my tastes, and towards, you know, juicy contemporary or historical fiction, but I try and buy books on, you know, I’m reading on rust for instance, I don’t even think it’ll be directly relevant to anything I write, but really interesting. Rust the silent enemy.

So I need that that little thing to just the palate cleanser where you’re like, I need to I read so many things like that are ostensibly related to work. And sometimes I’m like, I just need to read something right now that has nothing to do with anything else.

Yes, a palate cleanser? Great way to put it. Yeah, I mean, reading is such a joy to me. And you know, like many people, I feel I wouldn’t have got through COVID without reading, I suppose many of us get quite set in our way. So I like to read things say that people recommend to me or, or, you know, suddenly read something that’s, you know, aimed at eight year olds and just keep taking risks with the reading rather than playing for comfort.

I have to say yours was the only sort of pandemic book that I read during the pandemic, which is, you know, because Pull of the Stars had a sort of interesting timeline with our own world. But that book really was exactly what I needed to sort of reframe.

Yeah, that was that was about 1918, and the flu pandemic. And it was all finished before COVID. But it just by enormous fluke, it came out during COVID. And one thing I loved about that was getting to talk so much about nurses and doctors and midwives, and how much they were risking, and how much they were enduring. So it’s lovely to be able to sort of promote something else, rather than just buy my book. You know, it’s great to have somebody to champion when you’re doing all these interviews, you know, so in this case, I suppose I’m like, Eliza Raine deserves to be remembered. It’s good to have a mission.

The life that you imbue her through this book, I think is going to be so fulfilling for anyone who finds their way to this, because even if they have no interest in sort of the world around her at that time, even if they don’t know anything about that, period, I can’t imagine how you wouldn’t fall in love with her as she falls in love with an it’s incredible.

Well, thank you. And, you know, I think one aspect of her the people are probably more sympathetic to now than 50 years ago, is mental health, shakiness. And we don’t have a clear diagnosis for her. But you know, in her letters, you can see the kind of alternating strands of anxiety and gloom and even times of being a bit manic and spending too much. And I think I think modern readers are so much more open about this, that mental health is a continuum, and that people are not just, you know, a mad type, but that mental illness is something that can affect anyone. And I think so many young people in particular, are sympathetic to these, these kind of shifting sands, mentally speaking. So I think I think people are a lot more ready for honest depictions about what mental health might look like, than they used to be.

Absolutely, it is going to hit so many people in so many different places. And I can’t wait for people to get their hands on it. But I have to ask, because I’m selfish, and I need to know. Are you working on something else? Is there something on the horizon coming?

Yes, I’m, I’m just back from a year in Paris with the family. So I’m writing a novel set in 1895 in France.

I can’t wait. I’ll follow you anywhere. I’ll read anything; I have for years. So I cannot wait. And Emma, Donoghue, thank you so much for joining us today and for talking with us about Learned by Heart. It’s out now and I cannot wait for people to read it.

It’s been a treat talking to you. Thank you well.